Early Modern Trade in the Caspian Region

The Caspian Sea is the world’s largest inland sea. The enclosed body of water was mentioned by ancient geographers as early as the sixth century BCE.¹ Like many ancient nodes of Eurasian trade, in contrast to the European histories of the New World, there is no single discovery Europeans celebrate. The Caspian Sea appeared on maps of Renaissance cartographers, even if with less accuracy than Arabic geographers of the tenth century depicted it.

Today, Russia flanks its shores on the west, Iran to the south. Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan are the lesser sovereign powers who abut its shore. Turkey, the other regional power, looms large on the other side of the Caucasus. The Caspian Sea is place of ancient and contemporary importance. This inland sea has been a site of shifting geopolitical dynamics for centuries. It has been a site for political rivalries and negotiation just as it has been a site for trade and transit since before East and West became such operative conceptual categories.

Merchants from Russian principalities in forested lands far up the Volga ventured south and across the Caspian by the fifteenth century, at least, as the account of the Tver’ merchant Afanasii Nikitin attests.² The Muscovite state extended its sovereignty eastward across Eurasia in the mid-sixteenth century, conquering Kazan’ in 1552, followed by the demise of the Khanate of Astrakhan in 1556. Russia’s sovereignty may have been more aspirational than real, not only in the Caspian but along the Volga as well.³ Nonetheless, its influence was rising in the region. By the seventeenth century, Russia’s merchants were regularly engaged with commerce in the Middle East and Central Asia. Fedot Afanasev syn Kotov, a merchant from Moscow, recorded his impressions of Isfahan, the capital of Iran in 1634. Kotov observed a bustling: “round about the maidan [market] are bazaar streets and coffeehouses and hostelries and mosques, all built of stone, and in front of the storehouses they have all kinds of flowers painted in many colors and in gold and all kinds of people trade in them, Tadjiks, Indians, Turks, Arabs from Armenia, Afghans, Jews, and all manner of people.” Nearby were “about two hundred shops; and alongside that another street and in that street they make all kinds of copperware, and in the same street they dye cotton prints, and coarse cotton cloth is brought from India and Arabia.”⁴

As Muscovy began to extend its influence into the Caspian, simultaneously other European ventures sought to do the same. The early-modern Caspian became a site for increasing geopolitical competition among European powers. Anthony Jenkinson (1529–1610/11) is the most renowned of several English company men who sought a pathway to the riches of the East through the Caspian region. Jenkinson in 1559 described a journey there “so miserable, dangerous, and chargeable with losses, charges and expenses, as my penne is not able to express.” Yet, he nonetheless insisted that there was “profite to be had” and it was “a trade worthie to bee followed.”⁵

Adam Olearius (1599–1671), a Holstein diplomat-scholar, also traveled the Caspian. The crossing, due to the shallow depth and problematic winds, gave Olearius “inexpressible trouble” and he recounted other “misfortunes” as well, yet, he, too, so appreciated the significance of this sea that he mapped the region as part of his embassy’s travel to Iran via the Volga River.⁶ Dutchmen such as Jan Struys, in service to the Russian state, and Nicolaas Witsen, an Amsterdam burgher who used his correspondence network to try to obtain a map of the Caspian, reflect for us Dutch interest in the expanding global trade competition in the seventeenth century.⁷ Russia exploited this Western interest in Asian access along the shores of the Caspian as leverage in its negotiations with its European partners. By the eighteenth century, as Russia received increasingly large revenue from its Asian tariffs collected in Astrakhan, the region offset declines in trade revenue in the Baltic from ongoing European military conflicts.⁸ The Russian Empire simply could not function without its Caspian connection.

Any study of Russia’s foreign trade will uncover the centrality of Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea to Russia’s economy. In 1667, the tsarist state issued its New Commercial Code (Novotorgovyi ustav), which attempted to regulate all foreign merchants within its borders to improve the fortunes of its own entrepreneurs. Foreign trade was restricted to six entry points for the empire: Arkhangel’sk, Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, and Putivl’ for European merchants, and all others would enter at Astrakhan, whether they arrived from Iran, India, Central Asia, or China.⁹ While the number of west-facing entries has suggested that Russia’s European exchanges held greater importance than those from the east, scholars studying both the domestic economic and the overall scale of foreign trade have suggested otherwise.¹⁰

In either case, the Russian Empire played a key role in Eurasian trade networks, with access to the Caspian a key to its potential development. However, much of the economic history of Russia and its foreign trade partners has focused on Europe and the West. ¹¹ There is no question on the value of Russia’s Asian trade for the empire. Yet, it has often been treated as a second arena of economic development, reinforced by the state’s own creation of European regulations through its Western ports and border towns, and the operation of Astrakhan for the rest of Eurasia.¹² Astrakhan as Russia’s entry point to the Caspian network occupies a middle ground between the preoccupation with the Baltic trade with the West and the long-transit trade across Siberia to China and Central Asia. There should be no doubt that Astrakhan as the “official” entry point to European Russia provides a unique vantage on Russia’s global trade. Scholars working outside of Russia, and in Russia and its former imperial possessions, have uncovered important connections but, compared to other regions, the area has been less studied.¹³

The scant research on this pivotal region remains surprising, as its importance in the eighteenth century was well known. After signing the Treaty of Resht with Iran in 1732, Russia gained special access to the silk-producing regions of Iran in a period when the British East India Company had been expelled from that empire. At the time, the British diplomatic resident in St. Petersburg reported, “If the Russ understood Trade, as well as some other Nations, they might reap the great benefit by this Treaty.”¹⁴ Even if the resident raised doubts about Russia’s ability to prosper from its access to Iran, he still recognized this was a turning point in Eurasia’s commercial history. As the articles in this special section demonstrate, the Russians were actively promoting their foreign trade through Astrakhan through new regulations and necessary improvements to infrastructure. The British view from the edge of the Russian Empire in St. Petersburg was distorted, presenting a false image of a dynamic commercial enterprise to the Western world.

This special section aims to enhance our historical perspective on trade in this key region with new case studies. Early modern trade is enjoying elevated attention as scholars probe the centuries that by many accounts brought us a first iteration of a globally connected economy functioning according to capitalist principles. Incorporating this region of historical and current importance should prove generative. This special section presents a sampling of research articles by Russian scholars that approach Caspian trade from various perspectives, chronologies, and scale. Primarily this selection showcases policy approaches (trade policy, political economic infrastructure and oversight; the intersection of public health and economic policy in quarantine protocols). As such, these pieces lay a valuable framework for thinking about the multifaceted dynamics in the region. Governance, trade in the context of colonialism, empire, slavery, diaspora communities, cross-cultural networks, legal regimes, knowledge regimes, and commodity studies (botanicals, silks, textiles, oil) remain, in our view, areas of fruitful inquiry potential.

Recognizing the centrality of trade to Russia’s relations with Iran, V. O. Kulakov’s focus is the imperial infrastructure created to support trade. The customs house collected duties and monitored for contraband, which included weapons and shipping equipment in the period examined here. The consulate was also significant. Its job was to monitor passports in order to police trade privileges. In the treaties signed by Russia and Iran in 1732 and 1735, Iran granted Russians duty-free status to trade inside its borders. As non-Russians, including Iranian emigres, sought to present themselves as Russian to avoid Iranian taxes, the pressure mounted on imperial authorities in Astrakhan to police identity. On the Russian side, authorities sought to ensure that only court-appointed Iranian merchants traded tax free in Russia. In the 1740s monopolistic trading companies were formed; their results were mixed.

The special section includes two short selections by I. V. Toropitsyn of Astrakhan State University. From 1753 to 1755 the Russian Empire eliminated its internal customs post, a reform that moved Russia toward a more modern order of unification and efficiency. Local exigencies, however, did not jibe with central dictates: Toropitsyn recounts how concerns over lost revenue in the porous Kalmyk steppe led Russian officials to reestablish in 1757 an internal customs post near Kizliar inland on the western side of the Caspian (modern-day Dagestan). An appendix to this article reproduces the memorandum on the matter, providing students with an English translation of a primary-source document capturing the challenges of border management in eighteenth-century Russia.

The second article by Kulakov examines the influence of quarantine measures on Caspian trade. In 1728–1729, a pandemic that ripped through the region claimed 18,000 lives in one year. When a new epidemic threatened in 1735, Russian authorities imposed quarantine protocols. Aimed at safeguarding public health, the requirements forced delays which meant substantial economic loss for shipbuilders and others. In debates that sound eerily resonate in the midst of the twenty-first century global coronavirus pandemic, Toropitsyn recounts the tension between economic prioritization and public health. Some Russian authorities made the connection between the health of the shipbuilding sector and imperial security. By the 1740s the health threat was not entirely resolved but the Russian governor in Astrakhan opted for a “work around”: counting transit time as quarantine time ameliorated the economic burden by reducing the lost time for maritime interests.

E. V. Alekseeva rounds out the special section with an article that brings a meta-perspective on political economy. She addresses empire-wide Russian economic policy in the context of what she finds to be the principal developmental tendencies of the global economy in the modern era, which she locates in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Alekseeva sees the main state approaches to political economy following a trajectory which proceeded from mercantilism, evolved to a protectionist stance marked largely by tariff implementation, before giving way to a period of liberalism in economic policy that was subsequently supplanted in the nineteenth century with a neo-protectionism. She finds that Russia by and large followed suit.

Taken together, these articles suggest the rich substance and methodologies that studying the Caspian region affords. They raise a number of issues that are historically germane and resonate today: the trade-offs and perceived dichotomies between public health policy and economic policy, and the proxy competition with distant competitors that this arena saw, to name just two. Together these articles shine a light on a region of great significance in the broader Eurasian nexus. While the Western-Soviet rivalry profoundly ordered the twentieth century, and those legacies continue to play out in significant ways, nonetheless it is important to recognize that Cold War binaries no longer order the world as they once did; and an understanding of economic dynamics of the deeper past—such as those featured in this special section—may be useful in making sense of the emerging order.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. Caspian Sea Encyclopedia, 121.

^2. “Afanasy Nikitin’s Journey Across Three Seas,” in Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, rev. ed., ed. Serge A. Zenkovsky (New York: Meridan, 1974), 333-53.

^3. Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Matthew P. Romaniello, The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552-1671 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2012).

^4. Fedot Afansev syn Kotov, “Of a Journey to the Kingdom of Persia, from Persia to the Land of Turkey and to India and to Hormuz where the Ships Come,” in trans. and ed. P. M. Kemp, Russian Travellers to India and Persia (1624-1798): Kotov, Yefremov, Danibegov, (Dehli: Jiwan Prakashan, 1959), 17 and 18.

^5. Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia by Anthony Jenkinson and other Englishmen, ed. By E. Delmar Morgan and C. H. Coote, The Hakluyt Society, Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia, First Series (Hakluyt Society, 1886; repr. NY: Burt Franklin Publisher, no date), vol. 1, p. 108.

^6. Adam Olearius, The voyages and travells of the ambassadors sent by Frederick, Duke of Holstein, to the great Duke of Muscovy and the King of Persia (London: Printed for John Starkey …, 1669), Book IV, p. 134, available at https://archive.org/details/voyagestravellso00olea/page/n173/mode/2up. See also Adam Olearius, The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, Samuel Baron, trans. and ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967).

^7. John Struys, The Perilous and most Unhappy Voyages of John Struys through Italy, Greece, Lifeland, Moscovia, Tartary, Media, Persia, East-India, Japan, and other Places in Europe, Africa and Asia, trans. John Morrison (London: Samuel Smith, 1683); Nicolaas Witsen, Severnaia i Vostochnaia Tatariia, vkliuchaiushchaia oblasti, raspolozhennye v severnoi i vostochnoi chastiakh Evropy i Azii, translated from Dutch by V. G. Trisman, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Pegasus, 2010). Kees Boterbloem, The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys: A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

^8. Matthew P. Romaniello, Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (New York: Cambridge, 2019), esp. chapter 3.

^9. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (PSZ), Series 1, 45 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia II otdeleniia sobstvennoi ego Imperatorskago Velichestva Kantseliarii, 1830), vol. I, #408, 677-91, April 22, 1667.

^10. For an in-depth review of Russia’s domestic economy and its relationship with foreign trade, see such works as Paul Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow, 1580-1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); A. I. Razdorskii, Torgovliia Kurska v XVII veke (Po materialam tamozhennykh i obrochnykh knig goroda) (St. Petersburg: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 2001); J. T. Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century: Windows on the World (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Erika Monahan, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).

^11. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., America, Russia, Hemp, and Napoleon: American Trade with Russia and the Baltic, 1783-1812 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965); Walther Kirchner, Commercial Relations between Russia and Europe, 1400 to 1800: Collected Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966); N. N. Repin, “Torgovlia Rossii s evropeiskimi stranami na otechestvennykh sudakh (konets XVII-seredina 60-x godov XVIII v.),” Istoricheskie zapiski no. 112 (1985): 141-76; A. V. Demkin, Britanskoe kupechestvo v Rossii XVIII veka (Moscow: Rossiiskaia academia nauk Institut rossiiskoi istorii, 1998); K. Newman, “Anglo-Dutch Commercial Co-operation and the Russia Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Interactions of Amsterdam and Antwerp with the Baltic Region, 1400-1800, ed. W. J. Wieringa, et al. (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 95-103; F. G. Safronov, Russkie promysly i torgi na severno-vostoke Azii v XVII—seredine XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1980); Herbert H. Kaplan, Russian Overseas Commerce with Great Britain during the Reign of Catherine II (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1995); Kalevi Ahonen, From Sugar Triangle to Cotton Triangle: Trade and Shipping between the America and Baltic Russia, 1783-1860 (Jyvaskyla: University of Jyvaskyla, 2005); R. S. Astashkin, “Problema persidskoi torgovli v russko-gollandskikh otnosheniiakh pervoi poloviny XVII v.,” Vestnik Samarskogo gosudarstevennogo universiteta 10:1 (2006), 70-3; Maria Salomon Arel, English Trade and Adventure to Russia in the Early Modern Era: The Muscovy Company, 1603-1649 (Lanham: Lexington, 2019).

^12. On Russia’s trade with Asia, see M. Iu. Iuldashev, K istorii torgovykh sviazei Srednei Azii s Rossiei v XVI-XVII vv. (Tashkent: Nauka, 1964); N. G. Kukanova, Ocherki po istorii Russko-iranskikh torgovykh otnoshenii v XVII-pervoi polovine XIX veka (Po materialam russkikh arkhivov) (Saransk: Mordovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1977); F. G. Safronov, Russkie promysly i torgi na severno-vostoke Azii v XVII—seredine XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1980); G. A. Mikhaleva, Torgovye i posol’skie sviazi Rossii so sredneaziatskimi khanstvami cherez Orenburg (vtoraia polovina XVIII-pervaia polovina XIX v.) (Taskhent: Izdatel’stvo “FAN” Uzbeksoi SSR, 1982); Clifford M. Foust, Muscovite and Mandarin: Russia’s Trade with China and Its Setting, 1727-1805 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); A. I. Iukht, Torgovlia s vostochnyni stranami i vnutrennii rynok Rossii (20-60-e gody XVIII veka) (Moscow: Rossiiskaia academia nauk Institut rossiiskoi istorii, 1994); N. B. Golikova, “Puteshestvie Angliiskogo kuptsa Romana Khogga k beregam Aral’skogo moria v 1740-1741,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, Seriia 8: Istoriia (February 1994): 29-38; Natalia Platonova, “Le commerce des caravans russes en Chine du XVIIe siècle à 1762.” Histoire, économie & société 3 (2011): 3-27.

^13. L. K. Ermolaeva, “Krupnoe kupechestvo Rossii v XVII –pervoi chetverti XVIII v. (po materialam astrakhanskoi torgovli),” Istoricheskie zapiski no. 114 (1986), 303-25; Stephen Frederic Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Rudolph P. Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600-1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175-202; Scott C. Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550-1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); A. L. Riabtsev, “Osobennosti importnoi i tranzitnoi torgovli Rossii cherez Astrakhan v XVIII veke,” Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (2003), 144-9; M. S. Abdurakhmanova, “Rol’ Armianskogo kupechestva v razvitii tranzitnoi torgovli cherez Dagestan v XVII-XVIII vv.” Vestnik kemerovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 62:2 (2015): 7-11; Sh. A. Magaramov, “Derbent v kaspiiskoi morskoi torgovle,” Voprosy istorii, 11 (Nov. 2017), 125-131.

^14. The National Archives, SP 91/13, “Claudius Rondeau to Secretary Townshend,” 7 October 732, f. 255.